August 9, 2011

Baltimoreans can rent out their parking spots thru Parking Panda

Hey Baltimore: Here's your chance to make a buck off your own parking spot.

Parking Panda, a Baltimore web startup, recently went live with its website -- parkingpanda.com -- which can also be accessed by mobile phone browsers.

Parking Panda is kinda like the Airbnb (a site that lets people pay for or rent out homes and apartments for travelers) of parking.

People who are looking to make a little extra money off their unused or lightly used parking spot can list it for rent on the site. And people who are looking to park in city neighborhoods -- perhaps during big events such as baseball or football games, or the upcoming Grand Prix -- can turn to it to find a spot they can rent with their smartphone.

The site is the work of Nick Miller and Adam Zilberbaum, two young guys from Baltimore who won a startup competition in the city in the spring. They are currently working on their startup in New York City, at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, but they plan on returning to Baltimore to jump-start their business.

Comments

It's so great to see this app come to life, this is a testament to how many great ideas Baltimoreans have. If Baltimore becomes a better small business incubator, this city will explode in some amazing small business startups.

I wouldn't say it's a "massive" stretch. Parking Panda won a Baltimore competition. They won office space in the Emerging Tech Center in Canton to use for their startup. Then, they won a brief gig to go to NY to ramp up, but have publicly stated they plan on coming back to Baltimore as soon as their stint is up in NY. And, their initial product launch is geared towards Baltimore, not any other city. I guess what's really an issue is that it can be hard sometimes to encapsulate the genesis and evolution of a company based on geographic descriptors, but it doesn't mean we shan't use geography somehow to try to describe them.

Thanks Gus. We actually are both from Baltimore and we moved to NYC for a few months to help accelerate our growth. Gus is correct, we are launching our product in Baltimore and we will be returning to Baltimore in September run and grow our business.

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About Gus G. Sentementes

Gus G. Sentementes (@gussent on Twitter) has been writing for The Baltimore Sun since 2000. He's covered real estate, business, prisons, and suburban and Baltimore City crime and cops. He was one of the first reporters at The Sun to use multimedia tools and Web applications -- a video camera, an iPhone -- to cover breaking news. He hopes to cover Maryland geeks and the gadgets and Web sites they build, and learn -- and share -- something new every day.

Gus has a wife, a young daughter and two feuding cats. They live in Northeast Baltimore.